I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

https://benadam.me/thoughts/my-experience-at-amazon/

by benadam11 • 5 years ago

704 666 5 years ago

erehweb• 5 years ago

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

jsiaajdsdaa2• 5 years ago

Business moves at the speed of now.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

This sounds like a '90s marketing meme -- do I have that right? I didn't enter the industry until after.

lloydatkinson2• 5 years ago

And also considering how much in house software development there is...

laluser• 5 years ago

Yes, but you can't realistically create a web app for every spreadsheet that is out there. Only when it would truly add value to the team over the long-term, does it make sense. In my experience, this is done when the spreadsheet stops scaling to the number of people that need access to the data or systems that need said data.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

Interesting, since they have Honeycode..."Looks like a spreadsheet, works like a database"

Waterluvian3• 5 years ago

Formatting is a very very distant minor gripe compared to what I think is the main reason this is a problem: versioning.

That being said, if it works, it works.

If it doesn't work, make a case for why and develop a _holistic_ understanding of the costs and benefits of changing the current process. Maybe you can change it, or maybe you learn why it doesn't change.

If it works, but it offends your sensibilities, perhaps this is an opportunity for self-growth.

onphonenow2• 5 years ago

Just a note that many folks on platforms like dropbox / S3 etc turn on versioning of excel sheets if they are in paid status for this exact reason. It's not perfect, but it get's you a lot very very easily.

Version - date changed - who edited.

Add in the universal flexibility (both function and who can use it).

You can hand an excel file off to admin temp staff all the way to the top 3 folks in the org in one file and they can all interact with it successfully in most cases.

This makes this very powerful.

itsdrewmiller• 5 years ago

Excel has versioning now! But it doesn’t work when people email around hard copies instead of links to the shared file, which they still constantly do. >:-O

windowshopping• 5 years ago

If it works, but it offends your sensibilities, perhaps this is an opportunity for self-growth.

I've had to learn this lesson. We have an internal microservice whose name is obsolete and no longer makes any sense whatsoever. Everyone is confused by the name until the original reasoning is explained, and they come to understand the original purpose of the service, now long since changed. It drives me up the wall.

I have time and time again made a case for renaming it to accurately represent its modern purpose, which would take an engineer about a week of work - there's a lot of code and config that has to be switched over.

The person running my division has shut me down on this over and over. It goes like this:

Manager: Why do you feel this is a priority?

Me: It confuses people and makes the code less self-explanatory.

Manager: How much time is this costing engineers?

Me: Well, about a minute every time I have to explain it to someone once a week.

Manager: And it would take a week to update? This doesn't seem like a good trade.

Me, mentally spluttering: But the name makes no sense!! It's the wrong name!! It's completely unrelated and has no meaning!

Manager: Do you think you can work with it anyway?

Me: sadly sighs.

I think the manager is right, as much as it offends my sensibilities.

_jal• 5 years ago

This is everywhere, and there is no escape.

I do occasionally blow things in to Postgres for my own sanity, but it usually isn't worth it, and even when it is, data goes back out to other people in CSV.

As just one example, if your secops department uses Qualys (and they probably do), that forces your secops department to use it, which means everyone who has to interact with them does.

Everything about internal budgeting is a pile of spreadsheets that gets thrown around.

Hell, when I moved one of our data centers recently, that process with the new DC was all all Excel sheets, despite the fact that we have DCIMs on both ends.

There is just no escape.

timdellinger• 5 years ago

The alternative is to have these business processes managed using internally developed software that may or may not be supported as time passes...

excel via email might (unfortunately) very well be the more robust and reliable way to go here

throwawayboise4• 5 years ago

And with shared updatable spreadsheets (i.e. Google Sheets or Office 360) it's even better.

SMEs are going to be way more likely to throw together a spreadsheet to accomplish some immediate goal than they are to sit down with an internal software project manager and spend hours educating them on the problem to be solved and writing "user stories"

kentonv8• 5 years ago

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it.

EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird.

EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben's. Wow. We'll... get on that. Sorry.

FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868

dymk7• 5 years ago

The page presents as an almost pure black background, and almost 100% white text to me - about as high-contrast as you can get. Maybe this is a light/dark mode issue?

ollien• 5 years ago

Yeah - on my phone it's WoB but on my desktop (which is dark mode) it's BoW

kentonv8• 5 years ago

I don't have dark mode enabled. What I see seems to be the default style, and is consistent across multiple browsers for me.

jacobsenscott• 5 years ago

I think it is because the font is so thin it looks gray, even if the thin lines are made up of 100% white pixels. FireFox reader mode makes it readable though.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

The weight was the problem for me. document.body.style.fontWeight=600 in the console made it readable.

It also has <p> styled with a zero margin, which makes things hard to read as well.

benadam1110• 5 years ago

- it has an 8+ contrast ratio so I thought it would be ok (also been mostly working in dark mode) - will update. Thanks for your feedback.

kentonv8• 5 years ago

I think some of the stylesheets are not loading correctly, I get 404 on these:

https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css

https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css

coldpie2• 5 years ago

A browsing tip: In Firefox, you can right-click on low-contrast text, select 'Inspect (Q)', and a thing will pop up showing all of the attributes of the text. You can uncheck the 'color' styles to restore a good text color, the filter at the top of the list helps find the 'color' entries. For some reason everyone loves grey-on-grey these days, so I find I'm doing this a lot.

I've been thinking of writing a Firefox extension to auto-detect the page background color and set the text color to the polar opposite of that. Haven't done it yet, but I'm getting close.

6DM• 5 years ago

I'll do you one better, just use reader mode. It's the document looking icon in the url bar to the left of the bookmark button.

justemre• 5 years ago

There is an addon for this actually. Adjust colors for your own pleasure and press F2 (or whatever you want). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

benadam1110• 5 years ago

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

kentonv8• 5 years ago

Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)

zzleeper• 5 years ago

I'm curious, how do they compare against S3? (cheaper, easier to use, ...?)

joegahona• 5 years ago

This page is almost unreadable for me too -- a giant oil-spill of light gray text on a white background with no discernible headers, no spaces between paragraphs, etc. Brave, desktop, Version 1.33.106 Chromium: 96.0.4664.110 (Official Build) (arm64)

winternett• 5 years ago

This happens with so many sites now... UI and 508 compliance seem to be going out the window lately... Almost thought I was goin blind. :(

kiddico• 5 years ago

It's a surprisingly small world we've created

rPlayer6554• 5 years ago

This kind of thing is why I love to be on HN. It's so interesting to be able to discuss technologies with the people that created them.

ordiel• 5 years ago

This is slightly similar to that moment when checking code and ask who is the dumb ass who wrote a certain piece just for git blame to show your name...

acdha• 5 years ago

As a Cloudflare customer, I really like that you were comfortable just taking responsibility and jumping on it. That’s a healthy sign in an engineering group.

teg4n_• 5 years ago

The idea of leaving before the year mark at a company that does signing bonuses stresses me the fuck out. Don't you have to pay back the bonus? When I got an Amazon offer that was the case

dymk7• 5 years ago

It depends. Companies can ask for (or demand) the signing bonus back. But some won't. I've heard of it going either way - it's luck of the draw.

fermentation• 5 years ago

Amazon gives their signing bonus out monthly over the course of the year to offset the lack of equity in the first few years, so I don't think you'd have to pay it back in this case.

Matthias247• 5 years ago

At Amazon sign on bonuses are paid over the first 24month, so there is no need to pay back anything.

willcipriano2• 5 years ago

Is that a signing bonus or a agreement to get paid less in two years?

crmrc1142• 5 years ago

Depends on your agreement. Mine was a lump sum up front for the first year and a retention bonus plus stocks for year two. With strictly rsus for the last two years.

delecti3• 5 years ago

You have to pay them back pro rated. If you leave after 10 months you'd only have to pay back 2/12 of the bonus. At least that was the case when I started at Amazon (admittedly almost a decade ago).

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

If you get a signing bonus that you pay taxes on, then have to return part of it the following year, do you get to deduct it from taxes?

ddlutz• 5 years ago

Interesting, I had two amazon offers and no signing bonus was like that. They essentially just prorated it out over the first two years as extra monthly income to be equivalent to the stock you would get in the later two years.

benadam1110• 5 years ago

Its "sign-on payments" now - so essentially you get a salary augmentation for your first 2 years (and its applied to each paycheck) so you don't need to pay anything back when you leave.

NotVerstappen2• 5 years ago

Think this depends on the amount - my sign-on bonus worked as you described, but some others I know got a lump sum (they were more junior and getting a smaller bonus).

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Amazon signing bonuses are there so they can compete on offers while retaining the internal culture metric of max salary.

_moof3• 5 years ago

I had to pay back relocation once. Incredibly painful, but holy shit was it worth it to get away from that place.

bowmessage• 5 years ago

Depending on OP's exact start date, the value of their RSU grant may be lower than when it was originally granted, making it easier to jump ship: https://finance.google.com/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y

masterof07• 5 years ago

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this:

- RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...)

- Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.

- Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why?

- Make it easier to switch teams

chrsig2• 5 years ago

- Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why?

probably too focused on frugality to consider retention

klodolph2• 5 years ago

They do consider retention, make no mistake.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

Amazon has to be at the point of literally running out of nearby human beings to be concerned about retention.

https://www.essence.com/news/amazon-burning-through-workers/

dpark5• 5 years ago

RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...)

They don’t want to fix that. I’m sure they save a ton of money by backloading vesting like that. With their turnover rate, they probably pay out a pretty small portion of their awarded grants.

As I understand it (having never worked there), they are also stingy with granting new stock, and consider unvested grants in determining what to award each year. e.g. “You had an amazing year, but you’re sitting on a bunch of stock already, so take this tiny new grant and fuck off.” I’ve heard this from multiple former employees so have no particular reason to doubt it.

User233• 5 years ago

You had an amazing year, but you’re sitting on a bunch of stock already, so take this tiny new grant and fuck off

That's true, but it can go the other way too. One person I know got a needs improvement rating and no stock at all, but turned around and did rockstar work the next year. Because AMZN happened to have crashed about 50% in that time, getting the person back to target total compensation for the exceeds rating required granting considerably more RSUs than they would have received had they also gotten an exceeds in the prior year.

stuaxo2• 5 years ago

- Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why?

I find the attitude in a company starts from the top - so I'd Blame Bezos for the culture that does this, look at how they treat their non software dev workers.

vishnugupta2• 5 years ago

(5% - first year, 15% - second

This is done on purpose because a vast majority of employees leave Amazon within 18 months or so. And those who can withstand that environment for 24 months and beyond develop thick enough skin and make enough internal connections to survive till 5+ years.

(bit of a tangent)

in case HR is reading this

HR's primary (perhaps only) job is to protect the upper management (execs and above) from the nuisance caused by workers down below. It took me a while to sink in but when it did it brought in lot of clarity to the way I deal with HR.

IMO this could be generalised to a reasonable degree. For instance, police force's primary job is to protect the government from the internal threat which is the population at large. Catching thieves happens to be a small by-product of it.

Employees' allegiance is, first and foremost, to their pay master.

samspenc• 5 years ago

I heard that their (miserly) first and second year RSU vests are made up for with a cash component during those two years, or am I mistaken about that?

amackera• 5 years ago

HR's job is to protect the company from the employees (that includes execs).

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

in case HR is reading this

If they cared, they would have done something about this long ago.

tinyhouse2• 5 years ago

| - Make it easier to switch teams

It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.

TideAd• 5 years ago

Do you still have to go through a full interview loop?

masterof07• 5 years ago

Is not, is easy to switch team if you know people in that team, and the manager already wants you, otherwise you have to go through interview loops, etc... At Google for example is way easier, as it should be.

andrewguenther2• 5 years ago

Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.

Surprised to read this. The tooling is what I miss most from Amazon, but I was in AWS the whole time, I've heard the retail situation is quite different.

masterof07• 5 years ago

in AWS is ok, in CDO is awful.

time_to_smile• 5 years ago

RSUs vesting schedule sucks

This is a crucial part of PIP culture. It took me awhile too realize how common a pattern it is for companies to offer promising RSUs as part of total comp and then drive employees out after 10 months.

That vesting schedule is just some slight of hand so that you think Amazon is paying you XX% more than they have ever planned on. In reality you're getting paid likely less than you would sticking at a smaller, saner company. If you knew that upfront you'd never join.

To be clear, not all companies that offer RSUs are like this (of course most of them have better vesting), but this is a pattern I've seen a bit too often.

libria• 5 years ago

5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...

It's 5%, 15%, 40%, 40%.

In lieu of RSU's in Year 1, you get a big signing bonus. Year 2, not quite as big signing bonus (hence the +10% RSU). Year 3 and 4, nothing but RSU.

It adds up to the same amount every year assuming no stock growth.

Are you saying you just want double your salary for year 1 and 2 and are planning to quit before year 3 when it drops to nil? Yeah, who wouldn't?

I wouldn't want to be a shareholder of any company dumb enough to offer this.

moneywoes3• 5 years ago

Doesn’t the signing bonus get revoked?

sharkweek4• 5 years ago

Hey congrats on making it 10 months!

"Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work"

Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work. Truly, he recapped it for me, the expectations were absolutely incredible and I'd consider him a hard worker who has found a ton of success in his current role.

I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). But living in Seattle, a notable chunk of my social circle works there. I'd say a few enjoy the scale of things they get to work on or perhaps the brand name, but overall none of them ever talk about liking the work environment/balance/culture.

One friend, at a director level, just quit on a whim because he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out. He told his VP to fuck off, left, and is now on sabbatical. I've never seen him so happy.

brazzledazzle• 5 years ago

he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out

Wow. It’s really difficult to imagine a likely scenario where that’s justified.

pc862• 5 years ago

They had a quota to fill, and they didn't know or didn't like anyone on that team.

Not that that is a justification, but it's almost certainly the reason.

pyrale2• 5 years ago

Imagine getting fired because your manager is on a leave and their manager sees you as free real estate.

AdrianB1• 5 years ago

Usually performance evaluations are done with managers of a certain level; if there is no manager to represent his/her direct reports, with stacked ranking they all get at the bottom. I personally had a direct report, ~ 10 years ago, with PIP because her previous direct manager was 3 months on paternity leave so she drew the short straw. The person was an average performer, so I fixed the PIP situation and she is still working there.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

I've never seen him so happy.

I've shared about how I was forced into early retirement, in 2017. I had tried getting another job, after leaving my company, but no one would even talk to me (I won't go into why).

It absolutely infuriated me. It was humiliating and scary. I decided that I didn't really need to be patronized and insulted anymore, and just gave up.

But I was quite able to stand on my own. I didn't need the money; just the work.

After over four years of working (harder than I ever did, as a corporate shill) for a nonprofit (and learning new stuff), I can't see myself ever going back to the rat race.

netizen-936824• 5 years ago

What does PIP stand for? I haven't run into that acronym before

lkschubert8• 5 years ago

Performance improvement plan

bennysomething• 5 years ago

I think it's performance improvement plan, but that's a guess

cjaro• 5 years ago

Performance Improvement Plan. It's basically the company's way of saying "We want to fire you, but don't have a reason on the books, so here you go. In six months, pack your bags and go."

atlasunshrugged2• 5 years ago

Performance Improvement Plan- it's basically the precursor to firing that companies do to cover themselves from a lawsuit for wrongful termination

kahrl• 5 years ago

Performance Improvement Plan: "We're trying to fire you but need to do it by the books as to mitigate liability."

Jemaclus3• 5 years ago

Performance Improvement Plan. On paper, it's a program where management works with you to improve your weak points so you don't get fired. In practice, it's HR protecting the company by documenting reasons to fire you before they fire you.

It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on the PIP and how I can improve AND I would start looking immediately for a new job.

hvs• 5 years ago

Performance Improvement Plan. Basically, a fancy way for a company to say they tried to help you improve before firing you.

yonig• 5 years ago

Replies laid out what it means on paper but what is the employees actual best move? Sounds intentionally impossible to climb out of. Are they given a buyout option to leave or just sit in purgatory for 6 months?

killingtime74• 5 years ago

Paid interview preparation (time). Only slightly joking

subsaharancoder2• 5 years ago

Worked at a FAANG in one team for 3.5 years (got promoted and had good reviews), transferred to a new team and got PIP'd by new manager and eventually fired within a year of transferring. One of my workmates clearly told me that my chances of getting out of the PIP were next to zero but by then it was too late.

Best advice I can give someone who gets on a PIP is don't wait or work the process, just make an exit plan and act on it (interview quickly) and own your destiny. Also if you've been a stellar performer and you move to a team where things aren't working out within the first 3 months, transfer quickly (go to HR and claim mental and emotional wellbeing) before your performance reviews get trashed and then it's impossible to transfer.

stuaxo2• 5 years ago

This explains a lot about why Amazon services are like they are.

robby_w_g• 5 years ago

I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later).

Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

Personal grievances aside, I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.

geodel• 5 years ago

It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.

Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.

colinmhayes6• 5 years ago

Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles

Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.

sharkweek4• 5 years ago

Yeah my entire experience could be summed up by saying everyone who sat across the table from me that day (with one exception, one person was super nice), was trying to prove that I was too dumb to work among the likes of them.

This was in 2004 though so maybe that has changed but it certainly stuck with me.

wallscratch• 5 years ago

My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to […]

Wouldn’t this be true of almost any other selective interview process?

stayfrosty4202• 5 years ago

Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles

I agree to some extent but moreso, I think it heavily favours those with a theoretical CS background, which means effectively you are favouring candidates from top colleges in a round about way.

Clubber2• 5 years ago

an ego-driven hazing ritual

Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.

throwawayboise4• 5 years ago

The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

OK, not professional, and fair grounds for deciding you don't want to work there (interviews are as much for you to evaluate the employer as they are for the employer to evaluate you) but.... have a bit of a thicker skin. Carrying something like that for 15 years instead of immediately dismissing it as the commentary of an asshole is just no way to go through life.

technothrasher• 5 years ago

Interestingly, my partner just went through the interview process at both Amazon and Google. The Amazon process was horrendous, with an insulting “good cop/bad cop” series of interviews. It was a relief when they decided not to move forward as the process was enough to know they’d be horrible to work for. The Google process was great, productive, and generated excitement about working for them. In the end they offered the job but couldn’t make the compensation quite work. But they walked away on good terms.

that_guy_iain• 5 years ago

My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles.

For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university.

The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spend ages learning things you would never do during your day job and if you did do them during your day job you would be considered a cowboy because there are predefined libraries that are optimised to do those things.

For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours and that the hardest thing at the companies is the interview process.

majormajor3• 5 years ago

I would love to know how long the average FANG dev spent on leetcode practice before their interviews. From my small sample of friends who've done stints there, it's far less than "months". I similarly have had - but declined - an offer from one of them with prep measured in "hours" not "days."

georgemcbay2• 5 years ago

I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual.

I'm 48 and I've been a software developer a long time. The technical interview at many companies has been an ego-driven hazing ritual my entire career, well before Leetcode even existed.

autokad2• 5 years ago

"My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field."

I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for an interview since ^_^

lumost• 5 years ago

Anecdotally, LC interviews are hardest when you're mid-career and get easier over time. As the main difference between a junior engineer and a mid/senior engineer is whether they can work autonomously, and an engineer with 3 years of experience rarely has good datapoints for invention/difficult projects. The only way companies have found to differentiate a strong hire from a no hire is by asking harder leetcode questions and expecting perfection.

As you get to more senior levels it seems like companies still expect you to do passably well on those questions - but make their decision based on other data-points such as impact/past projects etc.

FPGAhacker• 5 years ago

There is nothing worse than being laughed at in an interview.

Dig1t• 5 years ago

Just in general this is extremely rude to do as an interviewer. I remember interviewing at Google a few years ago and the interviewer laughed at me when I asked her if they used Kotlin in the mobile app that they were hiring for. Kotlin was pretty standard at the time in most 3rd party apps and nowadays Google never shuts up about it in their dev talks, but back then I guess it was so unlikely that Google itself would be using the language in its own apps that she thought it was funny. It came across as pretty rude in that interview setting, though she probably was not intending to be so.

When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny.

mrbonner• 5 years ago

That interviewer behavior is borderline abusive.

boppo1• 5 years ago

The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

Is it possible you had a better solution that the interviewer simply didn't recognize?

gcanyon• 5 years ago

I had a similar experience in a college physics class. I was reviewing my solution to a problem (maybe angular momentum?) with the TA, and they said, “I know you got the right answer, but I don’t see how I can give you credit for this when I don’t understand your solution.”

And I replied, “Is it even remotely possible I came up with the correct answer by chance?” They agreed not. “Then why should it be my problem that you can’t understand my method?”

In retrospect I was an ass, but I got credit and passed the class, so…

austincheney• 5 years ago

Or even people currently in programming jobs doing real world code all day instead of hand jamming some contrived leet code algorithm fiction that will never be allowed to enter production.

More realistic is to talk through a process that can be sporadically described in various 1-3 line code samples that will eventually be put together to form a program for something boring. A good boring example is something like transmit a file from a file system across a network and perform an integrity check. Boring but enough steps to talk through and demonstrate with a couple instructions. Nobody does this. I would hear a discussion on proper use of APIs and step by step walk towards success than see somebody lost writing for loops and conditions.

ignoramous• 5 years ago

...an ego-driven hazing ritual.

Google India (c. late 2000s / early 2010s) used to be notorious for this, so much so that Googlers I knew would rather have their referrals give interviews at Google HQ (MTV), instead (not that it was any better, but rather it wasn't as worse).

One piece of advice I received early on was, interviews aren't meant to be a pissing contest but often are. As an interviewee, accept that and try not to take rejections personally (easier said than done). As an interviewer, know that you're in a position of power, and try not to abuse it (easily done but never said).

jnwatson• 5 years ago

This isn't a new interview style. I interviewed with Microsoft in 1997 and encountered the haughtiest person I've ever met.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

It’s fine. I’ve seen code from FAANGs that evoked the same reaction from me.

zepolen• 5 years ago

My biggest gripe is that medical associations are systematically favoring candidates who have years of free time to memorize arbitrary organ names. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the surgeon field.

mercy_dude• 5 years ago

At least you had an interviewer who could speak English and explained the problem. Mine had an interviewer who just typed the problem and his English was so bad that I couldn’t get answers to any follow up questions. He kept saying “ok…ok” as I was explaining the approach and once I finished coding up my approach he said that’s not what he is looking for. I kept asking clarifying questions till the end but never got the answer since his English was incomprehensible. I don’t understand how a person like this can function assuming they have to deal with English speaking team members.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

"let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual

Don't hold it against your colleagues. A lot of this knowledge isn't obvious to anyone and people chiding people for not knowing would be the last to come up with solutions themselves. This is just insecurity and bickering.

Google has been a publicly traded company with a massive scale. If the technical problems aren't interesting to you, I doubt it is worth it to work there. The culture of such companies are always the same. Detached to minimize problems, don't make personal problem a problem of the company. Good colleagues can make you forget this for a while of course.

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work

... as fast as possible, whether it actually works in all cases or not. As Dilbert says "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".

pjbeam2• 5 years ago

10 months in the pit is no joke. I'm on 13 and often wonder how I made it this far.

tech_tuna4• 5 years ago

I have a friend who lasted more than 2 years which amazed me but then his compensation _went_down_ because of Amazon's crazy comp structure works.

I have another friend who was offered a job there and turned them down, then the hiring manager fired back with "Oh c'mon, you just have to last a year here and then you can put Amazon on your resume" which is hilarious and totally fucked up.

"We aren't going to pretend that you will actually like working here but if you suffer for about a year, it's gonna do wonders for attracting future employers"

I often wonder if Amazon wouldn't actually be more successful if they treated their people better. I think there's a strong sentiment of Emperor Bezos' New Clothes and survivorship bias that has Amazon leadership convinced that being evil bastards is the only reason/way the company can be successful.

tdeck4• 5 years ago

Plenty of places are hiring engineers for remote roles now, including my employer. If you're able to carve out some time to look around it might be worth it.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 years ago

From what I hear, Amazon is incredibly uneven in org quality, so it is really possible your friend got unlucky. My wife works at Amazon and seems to have a pretty good balance and has good things to say about her work environment, but she is not a SWE (rather a designer). Still, I don't think I would ever work there without a lot of careful research about the group I was going into.

taurath3• 5 years ago

This is what they always say but they never say which orgs are good or bad. When you’re a candidate you are rolling the dice

Schiendelman2• 5 years ago

It’s wild. I did more than 4 years across three teams, left, boomeranged, and quit after three months.

costcofries• 5 years ago

You and me both! I made it to the round of in-person interviews when I was pursuing a principal pm role. 5 hours of back to back interviews, expressionless faces, repeated questions and almost zero eye-contact.

I am not certain what they were going for, though I can tell you I left knowing that even if I had gotten an offer, there was no way in hell I'd be accepting. It's obvious there are some very successful (happy?) amazon people (amazonians?) but no thank you, I enjoy living.

halpert• 5 years ago

These are one-sided stories recounted by someone with an axe to grind...

lotophage• 5 years ago

within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work

I've heard that, because of the stack ranking, if managers want to keep their current team unchanged, they sometimes hire someone new just so that they can turn around and fire them.

kamaal2• 5 years ago

>Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work.

Its crazy how these FANGs promise the moon, the serious RSU vesting starts only after 1 - 2 years and the average tenure is like 1.5 years.

>he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out

I've heard this quite a bit at many places, when you go on a longish leave of any kind basically people kind of replace you. When you come back you discover your job is gone, for this reason alone I don't know many people who take these long leaves/vacations.

tikiman163• 5 years ago

I've also had engineering friends that worked for Amazon, none of them had anything positive to say about them. One interesting situation is that one of them worked for Google for several years before moving to Amazon. Less than 2 months later he quit working for Amazon and went back to Google.

I've read articles claiming that Bezos had certain opinions about people being lazy, and that he intentionally structured Amazon to make it almost impossible to get promoted. Basically, people are hired to do a specific job, and they will never be allowed to do any other job or be promoted until they quit from overwork. The exceptionally few people that both deliver the impossible and don't quit over the workload are treated as valuable, but only at the specific job they are currently doing.

From what I've been able to piece together, this was always at least somewhat true, but has gotten much worse the last few years. I think Amazon is likely going to start running dry on willing candidates in their engineering and management teams within a couple of years and we'll see them start to lose market share as a result.

pram• 5 years ago

A couple years ago I turned down an offer at AWS as a Solutions Architect. The same day I did that, the hiring managers director requested that I speak with him. He was basically selling the job and saying what a mistake it was to turn it down. It felt really high pressure!

I’ve literally never had that happen in my life. Most companies just immediately ghost me if I turn down an offer. This isn’t covert bragging about being some kind of superstar either, it just felt like they were desperate. I know all the horror stories about people getting PIPs, it kinda started feeling like some kind of trap lol

pinewurst2• 5 years ago

I had that happen once - not at Amazon - where the startup CEO kept calling me leaving increasingly angry messages for not talking with him post my rejection. Shudder...

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

it just felt like they were desperate

That's what it sounds like. I had a guy from my past (somebody I had worked for years ago, but didn't know that well) call me up out of the blue once, basically begging me to come work for him. I was flattered, and looking forward to (finally) being treated like a human being instead of a replaceable cog for once in my programming career, so I took the job. Good lord, what a mistake. The reason he was begging was because he was a totally abusive asshole and couldn't keep anybody for any amount of money. You would think that watching people come and go would make these people re-evaluate their approach, but in their minds, it's always the "peons" that are wrong.

cwkoss2• 5 years ago

Should have seen how much they'd be willing to increase the offer.

alexitosrv• 5 years ago

I just started an application with them also for a Solutions Architect role, I even have a scheduled technical interview in a couple of weeks. Wondering if I should go through. Really don't like what I am finding here, but not sure if it's just a biased thread where people which love their jobs are not here defending AWS or if it's truly a dysfunctional org in that area, or too team dependent (which is a lottery then).

Is it anything good of working at AWS?

donretag• 5 years ago

Cases like these happen at companies at all levels. Massive companies such as Amazon and especially at startups, where roles are not as defined.

After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a year, due to the COVID closures affecting my plans.

Hadriel• 5 years ago

Yeah it's the same exact thing at Meta/FB lol

oblio7• 5 years ago

The funky thing is the different stigma attached to equivalent situations.

You embellish your CV as an individual and you overdo it = possible catastrophe.

Companies constantly embellishing job postings = just a regular Tuesday.

I'm having a really hard time remembering a job where the job descriptions really matched the day to day activities, and I've worked for ~10 companies, big and small, from Asia, Europe, America.

behohippy2• 5 years ago

Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for

Why does Amazon do this? I've bailed out 3 times on interviews with them now because somehow the role they sold me on end up being completely different by the time you talk to the team members doing the actual job. It's a huge time waster for everyone involved.

spike0214• 5 years ago

Heh something similar happened to me. Recruiter reached out, insisted role was on a special new team in SFO. I did the full interview cycle (on-site in Seattle, which I later learned is what they do if the role is in SEA..).

It was for an awesome team and org, really up and coming.

I get the congrats message that I’ll be getting an offer. Then find out it’s only for SEA. This is after the recruiter insisted it would be SFO because I didn’t want to relocate for various reasons.

Ah so that’s why they flew me to Seattle.. lol.

Ended up being passed around a few orgs recruiters and took a role in sfo that I finally left after 20 months. Sigh.

optymizer• 5 years ago

I was hired as an Android developer. After 1 year, my manager called me on a Sunday afternoon, and asked me: "do you know HTML?". I said: "yes, who doesn't?". On Monday I was transferred to the web team to work on customer retention.

From the business's point of view, they were trying to plug an urgent hole, from my career's point of view, I wanted to work on mobile Android apps. I moved back to an Android team in a month, which required VP-level approval.

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

I finally started just marking their recruiter emails as spam. I still get a couple a month despite asking them to stop. I interviewed for them a few years back and it was clear then that they are looking for people that are technically smart but total pushovers. If you are the type of person that are susceptible to abusive relationships then you'd fit right in. The sad part is many of their employees prob feel lucky to be in that situation. If you know your own worth you would not work for them and if you believe in treating humans with respect and dignity you'd definitely not work for them. I got a sense of a complete lack of ethics.

delecti3• 5 years ago

What filter rules do you use for that? As a frequent Amazon customer I wouldn't want to accidentally filter things I want to receive.

My recruiter strategy has just been to reply with a direct "Hi <name>, No thank you." that doesn't leave room for foot-in-the-door.

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

I just routinely do a cursory glance of my spam folder, but so far no issues. I am guessing it doesn't do much but I like to think if enough people flag them as spam that they then get marked as spam throughout Gmail.

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

This is explicitly the opposite of what the interviews look for. If you are a pushover you will not have the disagree and commit, dive deep, and ownership lp stories you need.

I’ve done quite a few interviews for Amazon and the debrief was never ‘this person has strong opinions, not inclined’. If you’re not interested in getting the data to prove or disprove your opinions then that will count against you.

encryptluks24• 5 years ago

Okay, just because a rat works hard to get out of a maze doesn't mean it knows it is in one. When your interviewer asks to video record you, then proceeds to ask questions while refusing to look at you and pounding away on their laptop keyboard saying they are taking notes. Mind you this goes on for about 4 hours with multiple people that appear to be performing some sort of unethical psychological experiment to see if you're a good fit for their cult.

mynameisash2• 5 years ago

I also left Amazon after ~10mo. I've written about this elsewhere, but the short version is:

* New manager who was a nice guy but didn't help me or other folks onboard

* A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire.

* SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, and he said he "didn't know" what we owned. I asked him for help configuring a monitor for a service, and he said he couldn't figure it out while literally backing away from my desk slowly.

* A culture within our team in which no one was willing or able to help others out. It was very much every man for himself.

I GTFO of there and have been happy across the lake since. Paying back my signing bonus was well worth the significant reduction in stress and quality of life.

strikelaserclaw2• 5 years ago

was the sde3 just faking ignorance so he didn't have to help you out?

rjbwork2• 5 years ago

Possibly making sure that GP was at the bottom of the stack rank and looking out for his own neck.

sharkweek4• 5 years ago

Friend is a recruiter at that company across the lake and says she reaches out to Amazon folks when they hit the 1 and 2 year marks a lot - says she gets relatively higher response rates than industry standards when she does that.

telotortium• 5 years ago

What's the company across the lake - Microsoft?

davidsawyer• 5 years ago

Almost surely

easton• 5 years ago

Assuming the lake is Lake Washington, it looks like it.

uncomputation• 5 years ago

It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains.

Enterprise work summed up in one sentence. Impressive. While I agree with Andreessen’s “software is eating the world,” it might be more apt to say “Excel is eating the world.”

mchaynes• 5 years ago

I left amazon after just under 2 years and I agree with everything you wrote here.

You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with.

On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with

spike0214• 5 years ago

Huge plus one here, same situation. Except opposite situation with my team/manager unfortunately.

wiremine• 5 years ago

This is really insightful. Makes me wonder how this compares to other FAANG companies. Are there other essays that capture the on-the-ground experiences so well?

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

I would tell you you’re going to get the same problem regardless: this isn’t representative and due to scale can never capture the on the ground experience.

Amazon is the best and worst place I’ve worked.

monster_group• 5 years ago

FTA - "I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript)"

But hey, you bet he knows topological sort and dynamic programming.

mattbrewsbytes3• 5 years ago

The article writer said he was in the Devices org so I would bet there are a huge number of hardware engineers there. That engineer could be very proficient with C and firmware and might have not touched web stuff since college, even if that was covered then.

Really telling of an organization that your personal skills don't matter when they just need bodies.

benadam1110• 5 years ago

Nailed it ... they were experts in firmware and systems programming and had never really done web development before (that said, they were working very hard to do a good job, just unfortunate that they were set up for failure in a lot of ways).

faangiq3• 5 years ago

And reporting to a management chain that doesn’t know any of it!

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

(It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases)

I worked for a Japanese company, and they used Excel for everything. GANTT Charts were done in Excel (not Project), documentation was written in Excel (not Word), etc.

They had these monster 3,000-row excel punchlists for QC. If even one test failed, the whole shooting match was scrapped.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

Oh, I forgot to mention.

Slideshows were done in Excel (not PP).

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

This sounds like that Simpsons episode where Burns and Smithers go to a Moroccan bazaar and everything is made of drugs including the money.

lazyant• 5 years ago

I had server shell output from one of the "Big 4" consulting companies being sent as a screenshot of the terminal embedded as a pic in an Excel spreadsheet.

hackerlytest• 5 years ago

As someone who's preparing for a job interview, this post was revealing.

matsemann2• 5 years ago

When I read through they offer they were pushing aggressively for a start date (2 weeks from the offer).

Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn't swept away from under your feet one day.

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

3 months? So if you accept an offer today, it would be customary to stay until April?

That's incredible. How are job tenures in Norway? Where I am, lots of people stay 14 + or - 4 months typically.

matsemann2• 5 years ago

Yeah, you would start your new job at May 1st if you sent in your resignation during January. It's a bit long I feel, when I first resigned last year (in January, even), I mentally started to check out towards the end. A month or two is fine to wrap things up. But 3 months + what's left of the current month was a bit much. But as I said, it goes both ways, and it's almost impossible to get fired here, so it's worth it for the peace of mind knowing you'll always get paid next week, month etc.

Where I worked before the avg employee had worked there for about 3-4 years, and that number was heavily influenced by the new hires not having had the opportunity to work that long yet, even. I feel that's true for many of my friends as well, those having switched a few jobs since graduating have stayed avg ~3 years.

oblio7• 5 years ago

In many places in Europe it's 1 month for regular roles and 2 months for leadership.

And it's 3 or 6 months for being fired.

ithinkso• 5 years ago

Poland also has 3 months (on the most popular type of job contract). If you just joined you are on a 'test period' of sorts where the notice is 2 weeks and after that ends (3 months as well I think, but maybe this may vary) you have the 3 months notice.

Note that if both parties agree it can end sooner, they can also fire you straight up and forbid you working if they don't want you to but they still need to pay your salary for the entire notice period.

exlurker• 5 years ago

Only if you worked for 10 years in the same company. 1 month is the regular for <5 years tenure. However, the employee may actually demand 3 months.

ryanianian• 5 years ago

The churn I experienced was significant

One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy.

Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics.

Of course every org/VP has some latitude, but this is a common principle adopted by many VPs to appease the "bar raiser" standards as well as giving enough motivation to axe employees with considerable equity despite how good they may be on an absolute scale.

This was the policy at a number of orgs when I was there 5 years ago, and I have heard similar stories as recently as 2019 pre-covid.

tablespoon5• 5 years ago

Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition.

I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy.

Which is another reason I'd never touch Amazon with a ten-foot pole: it's not worth the risk of getting used and abused like that (on top of all the other issues).

thebean11• 5 years ago

Can I volunteer? I'll make it super easy to fire me and not even show up, just collect a paycheck for a couple weeks.

User233• 5 years ago

Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements.

the_snooze• 5 years ago

Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition.

That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.

qqtt• 5 years ago

That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.

I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad.

It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists.

It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly.

Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.

ubermonkey2• 5 years ago

Wow, I thought the horror stories out of MSFT had put an end to stack-ranking forced-PIP evaluations. It seems incredibly counter productive, and leads to things like hire-to-fire that are just indefensible.

Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?

darkwater2• 5 years ago

What would be the rationale behind this? In their ideal world, why do they need it?

khazhoux5• 5 years ago

Counter-point (and I'm a manager):

Every single team I've managed, I've given the lowest performers a huge benefit of the doubt, and a long timeline for improvement. In some cases, it wound up being a PIP->firing. But more often than not, I wind up trying one thing after another with the lowest performers, because I so much want to believe in them. They're always nice people, but they don't deliver. They say "I'm working on X... I'm still working on X... Will have something ready in 2 weeks... I hit a blocker, it'll be another 2 weeks." And I try to help them, unblock them, mentor them, reassign them to some other task that might be better suited. But the harsh reality is that many many people are just not good developers, no matter how much you both want them to be.

So on every team I've ever managed, if I'd been forced to put the lowest performer on a PIP, it would have been good for the whole team. And I think I'm probably not alone in this.

(Of course, this applies only to a limit. At some point, you've eliminated the actual low-performers, and shouldn't ever manufacture a PIP just to meet a numbrs threshold.)

prewett• 5 years ago

As a one-time thing, sure, stack rank is likely to be fairly effective. But what would have happened on your team if you had to get rid of your lowest performer every year?

sizzle• 5 years ago

How do these low performers pass the high bar for interviewing??

spike0214• 5 years ago

This is like my situation. I just left after being there for 20 months. Various reasons on the team side. Imposter syndrome is a bad excuse but it contributed. Tried switching but other teams insisted on a full interview loop before I could even see it that team would be a better fit.

dpark5• 5 years ago

Tried switching but other teams insisted on a full interview loop before I could even see it that team would be a better fit.

That’s because they have no consistency in their hiring bar. I know multiple people who were contacted immediately by Amazon recruiters after failing an interview loop. “Hey, that other team says you suck but I bet you’re perfect for our team.” When you know other teams are happy to take your reject candidates, you can’t trust internal candidates any more than external ones.

In fairness, Microsoft has a bit of this. The further across the company you want to move, the more likely you’ll need to interview. But it seems within Amazon that there is no attempt at consistency.

spike0214• 5 years ago

I definitely can understand that. But if I’m a mid level engineer I kind of have desires in what kind of team I’d like to join. I’d really hope a hiring manager can entertain that and let me speak with one or two people on the team before I have to agree to a loop. That’s just me though.

treis• 5 years ago

I know multiple people who were contacted immediately by Amazon recruiters after failing an interview loop. “Hey, that other team says you suck but I bet you’re perfect for our team.” When you know other teams are happy to take your reject candidates, you can’t trust internal candidates any more than external ones.

That happened to me too but I chalked it up to incompetence. They told me at the beginning of the process that I'd have to wait a year to re-apply if I wasn't successful the first go around.

CottonMcKnight• 5 years ago

I wouldn't wish the byzantine nightmare that is Cognito on my worst enemy.

tech_tuna4• 5 years ago

Cognito is one of the worst. Try the CloudHSM sometime if you're not feeling suicidal.

The whole Amplify/AppSync stack is another massive tire fire.

frx• 5 years ago

Do you have any recommendations for authentication services? I agree Cognito is not a good tool. However, it does integrate well with other AWS services (ex: Api gateway).

If there is a 3rd party service or tool that we can use instead of Cognito and if it also works well with other AWS services (Amplify, Api gateway) that would be awesome.

emptybottle• 5 years ago

It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work.

My own experiences, the horror stories I've read, the broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession.

It didn't use to be like this. There was a time not long ago when individual personality and skills mattered. Workloads could be negotiated, interviews were conversational.

But now it seems that a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines, and thousands of other companies follow suit almost blindly.

I'd love to see a job aggregator for anti-FAANGs. Does such a thing exist?

deltaonefour3• 5 years ago

Is this the norm? I thought this was mostly just amazon.

If it is the norm I blame it on the over supply of software engineers. The salaries stay high but the churn is now higher because with that high of a salary they will burn through as many engineers as possible to get the perfect person.

voakbasda• 5 years ago

I'd use it, but only if it excluded fads too. I don't want to be near Web 3, cryptocurrencies, or generally any new tech stack released within the last five years.

If you don't like this idea, get of my lawn. ;)

pkaye2• 5 years ago

Seems like you just need an job aggregator that skips particular companies you dislike.

unoti• 5 years ago

It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work.
broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession.
a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines...

I agree that these things are happening, but this is not happening everywhere. In particular, Microsoft is not true for any of the above over the last 5+ years since Satya came onboard. In my experience, every one of the above is not true at Microsoft, with one notable exception: the interview loop is indeed hard. But other than that, it's a much better situation at Microsoft. There are no difficult ethical positions (ethics and trust are first class core values there). Individuals matter, and allowances are made for different people's strengths and weaknesses. Workloads and deadlines can indeed be negotiated. It's far more "human" there than other places like Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and other places.

bc4m• 5 years ago

Microsoft's interview loop was the easiest I've ever had, it's the only job I've had where I've felt my ethics challenged, and my org's leadership was comically ruthless.

You joined a good org and that's awesome, but I believe you can just as easily join a bad one at Microsoft or a good one at Amazon.

thrwyoilarticle• 5 years ago

It didn't use to be like this. There was a time not long ago when individual personality and skills mattered. Workloads could be negotiated, interviews were conversational.

Er, when? Old Microsoft was infamous for the ping pong ball interview questions and stack rankings. Is this not just a result of companies in the tech market being successful and turning from plucky underdog to bureaucratic behemoth?

MattGaiser7• 5 years ago

I have been told by multiple ex-Amazon people that if you are moving for a job there, not to rent a place for the full year as there is a decent chance you will not need it.

Everyone I know says it is worth working there, but mostly as a grab and go for the resume.

ajkjk4• 5 years ago

I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart.

I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents:

* Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason)

* Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since)

* TT (ticket tracker)

* SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don't know what it has become.

qvrjuec2• 5 years ago

Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with

cmckn• 5 years ago

The first time I did a CR on multiple packages at once...that's good shit.

qvrjuec2• 5 years ago

Ah damn also forgot CRUX. Anyone know tools out there that would allow for review across multiple repos/packages?

andrewguenther2• 5 years ago

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

ajkjk4• 5 years ago

Well, the author sounds like they were mostly a designer, so maybe they didn't work with most of these.

akrotkov• 5 years ago

Incidentally, when I moved to Google after a decade at Amazon, one of the few tools that I missed was iGraph.

doseofreality• 5 years ago

Jira is bad, but SIM is horrendous. SIM makes Jira look good.

ajkjk4• 5 years ago

tbh it had just rolled out when I left and I was only giving my initial impression. I don't know what it's like to use long-term.

Although I _hate_ Jira so maybe I'm biased also.

scubbo3• 5 years ago

Interesting - I (Amazon employee) have a buddy at Grafana who brags about it all the time. I've tinkered with it, and found it slightly more functional than iGraph, but a lot prettier. What do you think iGraph does better?

+1 on Pipelines being amazing. A lot of people tell me Jira is better than SIM - haven't had a chance to use the former.

jeffe• 5 years ago

I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.

batmaniam• 5 years ago

The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being 'normal' at Amazon.

And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse.

At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working conditions through Unions. When will we finally realize that Amazon is equally over-working everyone and join that solidarity effort so that everyone's working environment becomes better? Quitting doesn't change anything, we can see they just rehire and perpetuate bad culture. Even the author of the article says just that; he was hired to replace someone.

If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.

atlasunshrugged2• 5 years ago

By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually? How many people who read this article and the likely scores more or bothered to look at glassdoor will bother to apply or accept a recruiter call? Eventually something breaks internally and the company is destroyed (albeit likely a very slow death) or it gets fixed. I don't worry a ton about HQ people, most of those can get other jobs but the warehouse workers in small towns without other opportunities, that's a tougher one and I hope that they are able to unionize or get some sort of strengthened protections themselves or through the gov.

tablespoon5• 5 years ago

> If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.
By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually?

Yes, but it usually takes an unacceptably long time for something like that to happen, and in the mean time a lot of people get hurt. As they say "in the long run, we're all dead": it doesn't do us much good if letting the problems work themselves out means we'll never live to see the solution.

Invictus0• 5 years ago

Why do we have to have "solidarity" on this issue? What does that even mean in practice? Everyone knows the deal with Amazon or learns very quickly, and either deals with it or quits.

exolymph• 5 years ago

If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon.

????? it's super possible to simply not work there

willheis3• 5 years ago

Tell that to Twitch and Ring employees. The consolidation of the tech industry is pretty apparent and I would put a lot of money on Amazon being one of the "final four" of the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

strgcmc4• 5 years ago

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't?

I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he's wrong about a few things too), but overall it's less of a "Amazon == bad" piece and more of a "this is why it wasn't to my taste" reflection.

Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team/org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that's obviously a bad thing, but that's not his problem either.

Note: in case it wasn't clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah

benadam1110• 5 years ago

Really glad it came across that way (that was definitely my intent).

tucaz• 5 years ago

People on this forum are usually too good to find problems within. With folks here, usually the other party is always at fault.

Ostrogodsky• 5 years ago

The irony-meter just exploded

analognoise3• 5 years ago

The company who ordered people back to the floor when a hurricane was coming causing their death when the building partially collapsed, has people pissing in bottles to meet insane work quotas, stack ranks employees, flys drones over delivery trucks to surveil drivers to ensure efficiency, repeatedly busts union efforts, might run through literally every available American because the churn at it's distribution centers is so high, uses its platform data to compete with it's suppliers, and whose founder Bezos is one of the richest men to ever live who built himself a literal space craft while income inequality is higher than during the French Revolution?

Are you absolutely sure that there are no legitimate problems with Amazon, or that maybe we're a little itchy with Amazon for a reason?

masterof07• 5 years ago

I feel the same way. But this "bashing" is good, maybe they(Amazon) see it everywhere and make them change for the better(at least a tiny bit).

haswell3• 5 years ago

I appreciate your comment and the nuance it brings to the conversation, but I also wonder if some of this is a distinction without a difference.

Isn't the only difference between the Amazon-bashing and OP's take just a matter of delivery, tact and perspective? I personally prefer a communication style that doesn't involve bashing, and I would probably choose to write a post much like the OP, but I think it's also very charitable to Amazon, almost to a fault.

For example, section 3: "Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)" resonates with me deeply, because many of the issues described are similar to the issues I face at a different platform company. These issues weren't always present (I've been here long enough to see the growing pains evolve), and my conclusion isn't "this just isn't the right place for me", but rather "the company is trying to continue operating in a manner that only works in small orgs, and must make deep fundamental changes going forward". Now, to be fair, if that change doesn't happen, then it does become a place that "isn't for me".

But "This isn't for me" implies it's a matter of personal preference, and perfectly fine for some folks, but some of these issues are deep, fundamental problems that must be solved and likely require changes in the org or every person who takes that role going forward will reach the same conclusion (or someone who's too desperate to care will just deal with it). That doesn't make the underlying problem go away.

Realizing that a place isn't for you and thinking about it that way is arguably healthier than getting angry about it and staying in that environment. But the reason that place isn't for you might still stem from organizational issues that make Amazon (or any company with similar problems) arguably "not the right place" for just about anyone.

strgcmc4• 5 years ago

Well, it's definitely a distinction with a difference for the OP. If I were a hiring manager and came across his resume and the name rang a bell, and I dug up this blog post, I would have no qualms about re-hiring him at Amazon despite the short tenure (assuming I could earn the author's trust that my hypothetical new team isn't as chaotic/on-fire as what he experienced before). His ability to communicate with tact and perspective, speaks to his strong judgement and professionalism, and makes me more personally inclined to hire/re-hire him in the future (of course, he gets to decide if he's ever willing to take the plunge again).

As for whether this indicates deep flaws that it might not be the right place for just about anyone... well I think there is the existence proof that Amazon employs 10k's/100k's of people, and while it may have higher attrition than peers (does it? I don't actually know, but I'm willing to take that on faith), still at least a sizeable majority is relatively satisfied with their careers here (based on internal tech survey results). So, "not right for anyone" is definitely an over-exaggeration.

Not right for you, if you are the type of person who shares personality traits and career goals/preferences as the author? Sure, quite possibly.

sbierwagen5• 5 years ago

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't?

Nobody is dumb enough to write a blog post trashing Amazon under their own name. He wants to be able to get another job.

vanusa3• 5 years ago

Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome?

I agree that it definitely doesn't read like a straight tale of horror and abuse. But I don't see how can you sum it up it by saying "he found some good practices" when he takes care to point out, for example:

Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)

Sounds like a grind, day-in, day-out, with lots of made up stress.

Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work. Ultimately this is not what I want to be doing with my career.

So the work sucked basically. And definitely wasn't what he was expecting.

One of the projects I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript) was tasked with doing the front end system design for a React application (and the API that would power the UI).

Standard sweatshop practices, sounds like.

Oh and did we mention on-call? About which he says:

To be blunt: it sucks.

Which (among other reasons) is why he quit after 10 months. Which is definitely not a step to be taken lightly, because (aside from losing on the compensation) it basically amounts to a resume stain.

Now of course he said positive things as well, and it wasn't a simple condemnation of Amazon, by any stretch. But still -- it strikes me as rather strange that you are somehow able sum it up as "he had good things happen to him there" and it was a "succesful outcome".

To my ears, his experience there read like a very mixed bag.

My paraphrase of his report would be: "You learn a lot there, but it's a grind that will suck you dry before you know it."

strgcmc4• 5 years ago

The good practices I was referring to, were things like: his praise of the documentation culture, the obsession with data security (which I read as a good thing, on behalf of customers). Of course you are right that it was definitely a mixed bag.

Your paraphrase isn't wrong either, but I would suggest a modification to it: "it will suck you dry, if either (1) you don't fit in with the company culture, or (2) you are placed in a bad situation on a team with poor leadership and high attrition".

Perhaps shockingly, not every team at Amazon is constantly quitting (e.g. my direct team in the last two years has had 1 person voluntarily leave for a better opportunity - and we wished them well, and 0 attrition otherwise), and also some people actually appreciate and gravitate towards some things like, what the author calls "team are fragile" culture (because it is in fact a kind of durability/resiliency that there is less reliance on special rockstars, irreplaceable dependencies, and that teams can be fluid but the product mostly works/lives-on).

5cott0• 5 years ago

I got an email from an Amazon recruiter the other day. I thought it was an invite to a phone screen but it was actually a link to my dev plan.

oblio7• 5 years ago

Dev plan?

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

I got a linkedin ping from an Amazon recruiter which I politely declined. He replied: "Great! The next step in our recruiting process is a short phone screen. Call me to set it up!"

EGreg• 5 years ago

I thought you said 10 minutes!

Given today's turnover rates, this isn't even a sensation.

peakaboo2• 5 years ago

I glanced through the leadership principles and laughed a bit. I feel sorry for the people who think they have to put up with that bullshit.

It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible, that's the single reason those principles exist. To make specially young and clueless employees forget it's just a job, because hey, it must be an obsession!

If you are young, this may seem normal i guess but I would never ever touch amazon.

munchler• 5 years ago

As another old guy: Amen. I love being productive, but hate being pressured. All these FAANG jobs sound like the opposite. No thanks.

NotVerstappen2• 5 years ago

Leadership principles feature in normal employee life in exactly two circumstances: when you are doing interview loops, and when you need to win an argument, eg with some jobsworth sales person who wants you to over-promise to a customer.

jkingsbery• 5 years ago

Current Amazon employee here.

It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible

This has not been my experience. The way I've looked at it as, these are more explicit ground rules for how decisions are made. At most other places I've worked, the mechanisms for making decisions was often quite arbitrary, and boiling down to whatever the most senior person in the room wants. When the Leadership Principles are done well, you'll see there are checks and balances built in. For example: yes, we have "customer obsession," and we try to work hard for customers, but if my boss told me to work unreasonable hours, he would fail in the "Earn Trust" area, and he would be in danger of losing his team.

I've found my work-life balance at Amazon to be pretty reasonable, and much better than pretty much any where else I've worked.

chickenpotpie• 5 years ago

There's actually a more specific leadership principle right now for bad managers "strive to be the world's best employer"

faangiq3• 5 years ago

They’re actually good principles just not followed at all by management.

franczesko2• 5 years ago

Ex-Amazon. Lasted 2 years. I'll just repeat the comment I posted the other day:

There are only two instances when you're happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren't worth it.

Avoid at all costs. You've been warned.

tech_tuna4• 5 years ago

What's interesting to me is that a few of the people I know how were AWS "long haulers" are massive assholes. It's almost like the kind of person who makes it there is not the kind of person I want as a colleague.

anonporridge4• 5 years ago

We call them 'Amholes'.

bogomipz6• 5 years ago

I'm curious was it consistently bad for those two years or more of a see-sawing of highs and lows? I ask because two years seems like a long time given the bleakness of your summary. I'm guessing this might also explain why they tend backload the RSUs grants towards the last 2 years of 4 year vesting period?

franczesko2• 5 years ago

It was consistently bad. During the first year or so I was motivated and focused on trying to solve the problems of my department. The writings were on the wall everywhere, but it didn't discourage me and I turned a blind eye on many of the issues. I would lie, if I would say that at the time money wasn't a factor.

Most importantly, Amazon's culture is toxic. Poor leadership (shouting and swearing during meetings) leading to bad hires. It's a cut-throat working environment with high staff rotation. I struggled to cope with the fact how people were treated (planned attrition and PIPs). I was working under 5 different managers during this time, being bullied by the last one. HR did nothing, so I voted with my feet. When this occurred, I was close to reaching a 2yr tenure, so it was easy money for me on the table.

mattbrewsbytes3• 5 years ago

I worked at a large, brand name, older company and there are parallels. I think past some size of an organization, it turns into a bureaucracy to get anything done.

- Internal tooling was poor and most teams DIY. Any centrally managed thing was horrible and either home-grown and poorly documented or some VP picked it and poorly documented

- The companies needs superseded your career goals to the point that very specific trainings were basically forced even if it had nothing to do with what you do (six sigma)

- To get anything done required 3-5 other teams to do anything and took forever. Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks.

One thing that was different was attrition. This was before remote working and when the nobody in town was hiring you really were stuck.

I like working in smaller organizations where you can have an impact. I only think one of the FAANG would be worthy of me putting up with working in a large bureaucracy again - the other A - and only because I haven't heard horror stories - if you have them, share them.

B1FF_PSUVM• 5 years ago

the other A - and only because I haven't heard horror stories

Not even the horror stories leak ...

raiflip• 5 years ago

"Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks." -> ok this one threw me for a loop. I can literally get an EC2 server spun up within minutes inside Amazon. But as others have stated org quality varies a lot. If you are dealing with an org that requires you to say at the beginning of the year exactly what budget you need, I could see that.

mattbrewsbytes3• 5 years ago

This was years ago with their own data centers and yes budgets with server allocations at the beginning of the year or twice a year.

antihero2• 5 years ago

Ah, at least there wasn't a CCTV camera by your desk that docked your pay for scratching your arse :)

swyx• 5 years ago

this actually turned out a lot more evenhanded than i was expecting from the title.

i took a job at AWS myself, and left after 8 months. partly it was pull factor to a more exciting offer, but i wont deny some push factors. Amazon hires generally very smart people, but the bureaucracy and legacy is just stifling for someone used to a faster pace in tech. After a while I identified the 4 things I felt that we had to ship in order to be a competitive product, and having determined that we'd take years to do it, left in good conscience hoping that whoever stayed would carry on the good fight. I didn't know it but my manager would leave 2 months after I did, lol.

good times, decent pay but it is clearly no longer Day 1 in many parts of AWS. If I were Adam Selipsky this would be job #1 IMO. AWS can only coast on past reputation so long.

benadam1110• 5 years ago

I actually loved the "Day 1" philosophy but you are 100% right, it is no longer Day 1.

i_dursun• 5 years ago

Always Day 1 of 90s

faangiq3• 5 years ago

Lol. Current CEO and his predecessor were sales dudes. They don’t give a shit what code monkey peons think or do.

dubeye• 5 years ago

According to a half remembered article , average retention is about 10 months, so when I saw the headline I assumed this was the topic. Amazon turn over more than their total workforce, every year.

This includes all staff yes, but still shocking. If true.

SwiftyBug• 5 years ago

This is crazy. At some point they will have hired / let go virtually every employable person. What then?

CRConrad3• 5 years ago

Then they start over.

clvx• 5 years ago

This makes me wonder how much complexity can they grow until it's not sustainable by the culture? At what point smart talent would say enough is enough and start hiring average joe's? How would that be reflected to customers?

throwawayboise4• 5 years ago

"Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)"

Sounds like my first job out of college (it was early 1990s, big consulting shop).

There was a ton of pressure to arrive early, stay late, 55-60 hour weeks were normal, continually document progress on your tasks, but the project overall was well behind schedule and what had been completed didn't really work.

We got paid straight overtime after 40 hours, and I didn't have much else to do with my time, so it wasn't all bad. I only did it for about a year. It was a good reference for my next job.

Young people can afford a few years in the salt mines to get some perspective.

RandallBrown• 5 years ago

I worked on a big team at Microsoft about 8 years ago. The overall project was behind so they started buying us dinner every night until we could stay late and get back on schedule. The sub team that I worked on wasn't behind at all so I just went home like normal every day.

After a few days of this my manager pulled me aside saying that some of the higher ups had noticed I wasn't staying late with the rest of the team. Of course I wasn't. I didn't have any work to do. I started showing up to the team dinners, but it seems the damage was done. My next review went poorly and I immediately started looking for a new job because I didn't want to deal with that bullshit anymore.

Coincidentally, I believe that was the last review Microsoft did with their infamous stack ranking so maybe the next one would have gone better.

AtlasBarfed4• 5 years ago

"How manual most of the processes were" - manual processes are more durable to turnover

"Documentation is very important at Amazon" - helps alleviate the impact of constant turnover

"Teams are fragile" - um, because of turnover?

"Everything is urgent" - indirectly because of turnover, because if you don't nag people to enable your deliverables, you get fired.

"Everything is built in house" - helps make you harder to fire, gives you bully power over other new hires since you know it top to bottom, protects you from the organization that is trying to constantly turn over people

trts2• 5 years ago

In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level.

This is put succinctly.

Seeing Amazon from within was an absolute shock. It is hard to be hyperbolic about the company's technical achievements: Prime, AWS, 2-hour Delivery, Alexa, Prime Video, Amazon Go ... absolutely incredible, world-changing stuff.

But the experience of working there felt like the place was on fire. People transferring teams in droves, joining in droves from outside, entire teams doing duplicate or triplicate work, managers of managers of managers of managers. And yet the speed at which they launch successful products at global scale is unrivaled.

I'm glad I got to be a part of it but there's almost nothing that could entice me to go back.

willheis3• 5 years ago

I'll accept the logistics management part of Prime and AWS as obviously major achievements, but Alexa, Prime Video and Go?

Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier, and every so often tells a child exactly how to electrocute themselves.

Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience.

And having moved to Seattle recently, I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.

scubbo3• 5 years ago

You are approaching all of these from the perspective of an engineer and not recognizing that ordinary people don't see products and systems the way you do (a mistake I also often make).

Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier

For the average person who isn't super-bothered about privacy, the voice-activated functionality is genuinely novel and delightful.

Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience

"2nd best to Netflix" is no slouch at all.

I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.

So - an intentionally-small-selection store has a small selection, your personal preferences don't line up with the (you must admit, extremely friction-free) checkout system, and you worried about a bug that (from the fact that you phrased it that way) didn't actually happen? Sounds like it's working extremely well for how it's designed!

(Disclaimer - I'm an Amazon employee, though I don't work on any of the discussed products, and frankly am pretty critical of them all both internally and externally too. But to claim that they're not successes _at the criteria that they are aiming for_ is mistaken)

phgn2• 5 years ago

How would you compare Amazon to working at a startup? Pretty often things are on fire in small startups too, but possibly people feel more responsible for fixing things.

trts2• 5 years ago

It compares in urgency and chaos but isn't as fun or rewarding.

llimos• 5 years ago

Is Ben Adam your real name? Or are you referencing the Hebrew for "human being"?

benadam1110• 5 years ago

It's my real name :)

(I had thought it translated to "Son of man" which is kind of a beautiful way to say human being)

CountDrewku• 5 years ago

How long before admitting for a FAANG has the same notoriety as saying you work for Walmart, McDonald's or Target?

throwJan22• 5 years ago

Are there any good FANG size companies? Amazon sucks, Facebook is unethical as most Social Media and ad selling. Crypto is a scam. It seems everyone is hiring but I struggle to find a good company to work for. Google perhaps?

ultrasounder• 5 years ago

Worked there from 2011-2012 at the then LAB126(Cupertino) on the kindle Fire and project. Was a total dumpster fire filled with Ex Apple folks who liked to throw their egos adound(this was when Jobs was still alive). Because I was in the devices teams traveled to china 4 times within the year, got burnt out by my next level managers and his managers and finally quit after taking in my singnon bonus. Took me a decade to get over that experience and now I am back to the races this time interviewing for Level5 software engineering roles with the MAAGMA(F went meta)companies.

e-_pusher• 5 years ago

Sounds like just another day in the consumer electronics world … Were you working on electrical systems or mechanical? How did the switch to software engineering go for you / what made you switch?

anyonecancode• 5 years ago

Always interesting to see comments from people who worked at Amazon. I did a stint, and I hated it, but I am always trying to get a read on if I was just unlucky, or if I can fairly draw a broader conclusion about Amazon overall.

I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn't "Amazon proper," or maybe the lesson is "be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture."

OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there's probably something to the "avoid working in a cost-center" lesson.

Then again, there's so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being "unlucky" seems to happen more often than seems optimal.

I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can't say I'd recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.

clpm4j• 5 years ago

I've had this realization at every company I've worked for, big or small. Not sure why I'm still surprised by it:

"The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual the vast majority of processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases."

peter303• 5 years ago

I wonder how Jeff Bezos Leadership Principles competes with Charles Koch's Secrets of Success. At times these have a cult-like following. And both companies are among the largestpublic and private in the world.

snowgrove• 5 years ago

I left Amazon after 11 months as a new college grad in engineering. As others have noted, Amazon’s RSU vesting structure is blatantly designed with the expectation that many (most?) new hires will leave after only 1-2 years. When I was there, the typical plan backloaded the bulk of the vest amount in the third and fourth year of employment. Contrast this with Google or many other tech employers who distribute RSU vesting evenly across the term of the plan. One of many reasons I’m glad I left such an anti-employee company.

saos• 5 years ago

CRMs, Email Builder, Complex Automations etc,

hmm are Amazon in the CRM space?

ec109685• 5 years ago

They do customer support and have a gigantic sales organization, so they have to have CRM tools (or buy them, which it sounds like they don't do).

treyfitty• 5 years ago

Is AWS terrible to work in as a PM-T? These stories in the comments are pretty somber, but not sure if it’s isolated by role.

mikesabbagh2• 5 years ago

Had similar experience with another large enterprise. I always wondered how come those companies can survive with such friction. Building small internal application was costing millions, 500x more that what you can build as a startup. It took me 3 years to quit.

Also why do you want to work for Amazon and Google? There are many great people there, you will not be noticed. Work for a smaller company, they will pay you more, appreciate everything you do and you will be much happier!

crmrc1142• 5 years ago

As a former amazonian, this one hits close to home. Especially the part about internal tools duct taped together. And most work being simply to stop hemorrhaging and bleeding.

wiggles_uwu• 5 years ago

long time lurker, finally qualified to comment on a post.

I've been with amazon for 8 years (still an employee) as a software engineer. I've concluded that your experience at amazon - both work life balance and technical - is entirely dependent on your skip manager and your org.

I started with Amazon in the bay area. When I joined we were still in the very early days of our project. The work was awesome, and it felt like we were creating great things. Unfortunately, the ops burden (oncall) became way too much for our team to handle and the quality of life plummeted. My existence during those days was pure pain. From there I relocated (through Amazon) to Seattle to work on something else. I did the move with the promise that I'd immediately get to work on a cool project, but I ended up sitting around doing nothing for months. I didn't even have a desk. Once the project finally started though, things become great. Both of these teams had different VPs, and the cultures of each org were very different as well. My experience in the bay area started off very positively, and then become extremely shitty. My experience in Seattle started off extremely shitty, but then it turned into the most fun 2 years of coding I've done.

Additionally, different orgs do things differently. AWS does things different from how Alexa/Retail/Music/Movies/etc do things. A good example of this: Twitch isn't fully integrated with all of Amazon's internal systems (see recent news for reference). Some teams don't have oncall rotations, other teams have brutal ones. One of my previous directors used to do bi-weekly (once every two weeks) fireside chats. I haven't even met my current director, and I've been under him for a year and a half.

If you're entering the company from the outside, you might very well be walking into a dumpster fire of a team. If you're inside the company, it's really easy to spot which teams are garbage and which ones are not. Below is my guide:

Red Flags: - No nearby principals (no tech guidance at the director level) - Too many principals (bureaucratic arm chair engineering hell) - Average tenure of engineers on the team is SDE1 (trash code) - No PRFAQ/BRDs (projects have no north star, scope is all over the place, dumpster fire product team) - Ops burden is too high (you can check a teams ticket queue on SIM, high ticket count = bad oncall) .... and many more ....

Doing team switches are pretty straight forward as well (ymmv). Once you're in the door at amazon, do your research and determine whether you need to switch teams ASAP. You can search any engineer's username and look at what code they're contributing. It's pretty easy to investigate the code base you'll be working on in advance of joining the team to determine its health.

Regarding tooling, amazon does and doesn't have great tooling. There are things like Pipelines, CR/Crux, Sim/TT, Apollo, iGraph, etc that are actually world class tools and don't really have any rivals out there (yet!). Then there are other things like people wanting to fork bootstrap and react so that they can rebrand it as an amazon version.... In one of my early teams, I saw the SDETs (test engineers) metaphorically go to war with each other to write the best end-to-end integration test framework. There were four frameworks in the end.

Regarding the leadership principles. Those are predominately tools to be used during the decision making process. There is this concept called "one way door decisions" which would be any decision that is made such that the amount of effort needed to undo that decision is not feasible. Basically if you take that door, you can't come back out. When faced with a one way door decision, you use the leadership principles to decide.

Are you on a fixed timeline because your deliverable is tied to AWS Re:Invent? Then you need to optimize for Bias for Action and Deliver Results. Are you about to create a core platform service that many many teams will build on? Obviously you need to optimize for Insist on the Highest Standards, if not you screw over your org for years.

The leadership principles contradict each other, but that generally gives you an idea of what's being gained and lost in the decision making process.

For software engineers, I would not exclude amazon as an employer just because you read some stuff online. If you can get in, do it and stick around for a year or two at least. The amount that you learn in such a short amount of time is significant, and you can take that experience with you anywhere. If you're having a bad experience at Amazon, remember that the company is massive. You can switch orgs and it'll feel like you just changed companies (only the tooling is the same).

Final thoughts: don't ignore your mental health! I have never had a manager actually ask about my mental well being before. I don't think that culture is actually fostered at all at Amazon. Use your vacation time if you have it, switch teams if you need too, or just straight up quit.

aojdwhsd2• 5 years ago

Any insight you can offer into AWS support roles?

fajarsiddiq• 5 years ago

hey congrats! are you starting some side project?

rk06• 5 years ago

When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level.

Counterexample: amazon

if every team is reinventing square wheels, they are adding a lot of inefficiencies which worsens the situation at macro level.

phgn2• 5 years ago

But if every team has to wait for planning from a centralized decision maker who doesn't have all the context, they won't get any important work done as well. Or they loose the motivation that comes with owning services yourself. A paradox, as the author wrote.

Startups are also duplicating the work of each other, and succeed against big companies because this makes them more agile. I always thought that seeing internal orgs as startups was the master stroke of Amazon and the reason for its many product successes -- but it has the downsides described in the article.

Ansil849• 5 years ago

the Amazon Leadership Principles.

Such bullshit.

Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.

"Lead with empathy", by creating conditions in which workers feel they have to urinate in bottles [1].

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...

tamaharbor• 5 years ago

I am a retired electrical engineer and have worked for various power utilities throughout the years. I have never experienced anything close to this, and have mostly good memories. After reading through the comments here, it sounds like most FAANG companies truly suck. I don’t know how you deal with them.

fellellor• 5 years ago

I’m impressed by your really clean website. Could you please share what stack and backend platforms you’re using for this?

Simon_O_Rourke• 5 years ago

I interviewed with Amazon about 2015, pretty long process but compared where I was coming from (huckster data startup) AMZN seemed ideal.

Onboarding was interesting at the general company level, but basically non existent at a team level. I gave it about three months trying to get to grips with the manual tasks underlying their Virtual IP assignment process (was on their networking team). Couldn't make head nor tail of it, had constant problems with the VM running on my laptop and basically started looking around for another job.

However, this little FAANG checkbox I now have ticked has opened lots of doors for me since then. I've seen most of my old team at a few tech events in the interim, and taking to them it seems like I got out in time. The team was "traded" to another senior director, and things got very bad, with loads of folks quitting.

My last day included an exit interview, which kind of stuck with me ever since. Talking to the HR rep, I said that the role probably wasn't a good fit for me, but maybe sometime in the future I'd wind up back at Amazon. You know, one of those throwaway comments you might say to be polite. The HR rep responded with "Well, you never know, maybe" while unconsciously shaking his head at the same time :)

aojdwhsd2• 5 years ago

Speaking of Amazon, does anyone have any insight into working conditions, etc in the AWS cloud support jobs? Interviewing for this soon.

I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

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